Audience

Impact investing

Institutional asset owners are bringing the scale needed to tackle global challenges from climate change and pollution, to better healthcare and education. But more can be done.

Impact investing offers a way to do this and generate the financial returns required over the long term. Impact investing is investment made in companies, projects or organisations that intentionally seek a measurable social or environmental benefit alongside a financial return.

The value of investments will fluctuate, which will cause prices to fall as well as rise and investors may not get back the original amount they invested.

Shifting the conversation towards impact investment

The growth of impact investing industry has coincided with a growing realisation that what we finance now and over the next decade will transform our world in the next century and beyond.

Scaling up impact investment

Impact investing in action: Emergency care unit

Healthcare is an important impact investment area and our 25-year loan to a large UK healthcare provider intends to help more patients in the UK in need of urgent medical treatment, while also targeting a competitive financial return for institutional investors.

Targeting real world impact aligned with SDGs

We look at why the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) matter to institutional investors, the role of impact investing in helping to achieve the SDGs and what the global goals mean for the growth and development of the impact investing sector.

Our approach to impact investing

The primary way we approach impact investing on behalf of our clients is through private debt – that is, through privately-negotiated transactions rather than publically-traded bonds.

Private debt investments that generate clear environmental or social impact can be across a range of maturities and different asset types. For example, this could be a private loan to fund the construction of a solar park or wind farm, or new affordable housing, hospitals or university facilities.

Using private debt for impact investing can help pension funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors meet their long-term goals.